Week 12 | America, here I come again!! | If it ain’t flow it got to go | The choice is made

Yesssssss, It’s that time again! I’ve arrived in the United Stated for another couple of amazing weeks of workation. I can’t wait to discover the adventures that life has in store for me. Exciting! And not only in the USA, but also in the Netherlands. The project team for the first Happy & Healthy @ Home cookbook keeps on working. I’m so proud. With the cookbook and so much more in my life at the moment.

Friday – I’ll be in the theatres

Today was an intense day. It started with a naked shoot for Libelle (a Dutch magazine) that I wasn’t looking forward to. I was about to give up on it, but I couldn’t do this to the journalist and the other three women who were planned after me. When I was on my way to the shoot everything that could go wrong, went wrong: I got the wrong start time (an hour later), fell asleep on the train and woke up in Almere instead of Amsterdam and there were no trains going back so I had to take the bus. I ended up arriving two hours late and for the first time in my life I felt really guilty. This didn’t help my feelings towards the shoot. I still did it and I am so happy about this. The photographs are amazing! I’ve never seen such amazing photographs of myself! The photographs with the article will come out at the end of June. Keep your eye for them!

After that shoot I was meeting a theatre show director for lunch in one of my favourite places in Amsterdam: Anne & Max. And it’s looking like my relationship, date and sex stories will be transformed in a cabaret of theatre show that I will be perform in the coming year! He’s also looking into a television deal! It’s all very exciting!

That evening I was interviewed for the cookbook that we are working on and it turned out to be one of the best interviews I ever had! Nobody ever asked me such personal questions. I’ve never even thought about them. It was a special experience.

Saturday – An amazing ‘do-creation’

Today was the last (and first) day for the production team of the Happy & Healthy @ Home cookbook to come together before the launch. We had half a day to get to know each other, go through wat needed to be done and deliver big results.

It turned out to be such a special day! This team is truly one of the best project teams I’ve ever worked with. One of the team members shared that normally when they had a creative brainstorming session with clients it wouldn’t go this smooth and they ended up with less result. In a ridiculously short time we delivered a lot of results and made good progress towards a final result. The final result we’ll present on the 24^th of June on our next food and launch party of the cookbook. I feel blessed to be part of this dream team of committed professionals. In other teams I feel I have to take the others in tow, but in this team everybody is on board and we are full steam ahead. I love this!

Sunday – A thorough spring cleaning

I was so proud of myself today. I worked three hours straight without interruption (inspired by the sixhour workweek methodology). It gave me a good feeling to prioritize all my projects and tasks and determine where my focus would be.

For every project or focus area I formulated two actions and categorized these in A, B or C. A being the most important and C could wait. And than I just started, like a robot, doing and checking of all the A-actions. After working focussed and undisturbed for three hours I got a lot done. And more importantly: I had an overview of myself and my life. And that’s a big relieve!

After working this hard I deserved a break and decided to meet up with Kylian. It’s great to meet up with people who are free and crazy like me. Especially the playground and trampoline were hilarious. It was great spending the rest of the afternoon on the beach talking and inspiring each other.

Monday – Horse coaching

All through this day I had Skype calls with coachees, LightWorkers and potential clients. I felt like a machine with all this talking and I don’t even know exactly what I did all day. I just know I’ve made a crazy amount of working hours today.

One of the potential clients, with whom I’ve been speaking about committing to a personalized transformation program for the last six months, shared that he wanted to change something, but didn’t feel the need for the personalized program. I myself don’t believe in workshop hopping or getting a little taster with just a couple of coaching sessions. We ended our talk with a good program that we created together which has an integral approach. It also included my new favourite part: a horse coaching session. I love this effective style of coaching. The feedback I hear back after a session from the client and the coach are amazing to hear.

Next to all the amazing sessions we have for our clients we also started a challenge where the theme for this week was: self-love. Having focus on this subject was good for me this week. Every day I thought about self-love and I look forward in reading what the participants get out of it.

Tuesday – Total workflow

This was a crazy good day! My meeting with Jasper, my business partner and co-founder of ‘Verlicht Werken’, was amazing. We took our time to really connect again and this felt so good. Jasper always is able to give me the feeling that I’m fine just the way I am and that there are always ways out of ‘shit’ that don’t have to be complicated as long as you are true and committed to your spiritual practice. Whenever I speak with Jasper I can feel my energy flowing and calmness.

In the afternoon I went to the office of our lead designer for the first Happy & Healthy @ Home cookbook. We spend hours and hours on creating possible covers for the book. I’m really pleased with them! While Elze was working on the covers I wanted to spend my time in a useful way and wrote a post on Facebook to look for a prominent Surinamer. Within half an hour everything was organized for this. Really! That’s what I call flow! If you do the right things, things will flow naturally and the right things find you. You’re walking on the road you are supposed to be on while using your heart as your navigation.

Wednesday – Time to detox

It took a big effort to get everything done before I was leaving. I was supposed to do all my preparations yesterday, but I spend most of my time on paying and sending out invoices, making back-ups and the production of the cookbook. In between all of this I packed my bags. I worked until midnight even though I had to be in a train to the airport at half past 6.

In the past weeks I withdrew myself to make sure that I got myself and my organization organized. This period really exhausted me to be honest. The amazing flow for the production of the cookbook, continueing ‘Verlicht Werken’ and ‘LICHTpuntjes’, rebranding and building on LightWorks with adding new business and project partners and lots of new clients.

This week a situation with friend escalated. To me this was one of the most difficult and energy consuming experiences this year. I don’t see the point in blaming somebody, but I take a moment to reflect why this affects me and what I have learned. I feel that the period from arriving back in the Netherlands until now was testing the stability of my spiritual and emotional foundation. To see if it really became stronger and give me a push in the right direction. To show me where I take good care of myself and where I need to focus on.

The biggest lesson in all of this for me is that I still want to get everything I can out of my life. I’m not doing this anymore with losing myself, BUT I’m taking care of myself in everything I do. I’ve learned it’s fine for me to demand quality and a way of working from people who I pay to support LightWorks. And that my feelings, needs and boundaries matter and are to be considerate by others (even when the others are not able to do this fully yet). Yes, I’m here and that’s all right. What matters is who I am, what I want and don’t want!

Thursday – On the road

A travel day with train, plane and car! It was time to leave everything behind again and travel to Los Angeles in the United States. I have been looking forward to this trip. This is going to be the place where I will shoot the final images for my documentary about self-love. And where I will finish my book about self-love with an amazing co-writer, counsellor and trainer who I ‘accidently’ met online. This is the place where I can join a community with events similar to LightWorks. This is the place where I met my first intimate spiritual partner and discovered how a connection like this can take you to the next level.

The journey felt extremely long because I didn’t have a video screen to watch movies half of the time. Instead I spend my time talking with the men left and right of me. They were very interesting and the conversation was about being busy, relationships, traveling, narcissism and work.

In the next weeks I will facilitate two workshops in the United States and I’m going on a emotional and spiritual detox: I’m going to be in my energy. I feel like I need this to do the great things that I was put on this earth to do. Nobody is stopping me. Not anymore.

I look forward to my adventures and journey in the next week. LA, Let’s go!